2.4 Release Notes

New “Related” tab

Better public repositories landing page

Beginning with Kiln 2.4, when an unauthenticated user hits a Kiln site with public repositories, they’ll be given a list of all the public repositories on that system, rather than being taken to the activity feed. We think this is a lot more discoverable, and provides new users with a much better starting point for delving into what public sources you’ve made available.

Changes and improvements to code reviews

We implemented four main changes to reviews for this release. Three of them are definite improvements, and one of them, we think is an improvement, but we’d really like feedback on.

Things that (we think) are definite improvements:

All of the actions you can use to modify a review are all located right at the bottom. We’ve tried to make it clear how to resolve and comment on a review, and made it clearer that you can resolve a review with a message.

We’ve made it easy to make a case right from any comment in a review. If you see something that doesn’t really need to get fixed as part of a review, but that you realized was a bug that needed to get addressed elsewhere, or inspired a great feature idea, just click the “Make Case” button on the relevant comment.

You can now retitle a review just by clicking on the title. You no longer need to take a trip to FogBugzland.

Now, the one that we hope is an improvement:

We’ve tried to make it much easier to have lots of developers contribute to a review by making it clearer that a review can be assigned to anyone, and by autosubscribing anyone who has seen a review. We’ve found this system makes it feasible for lots of developers to actually stay on-top of a review, without driving them crazy.

While we think this feature works well, it’s brand-new, and a change from how Kiln’s traditionally worked, so we’d love your feedback. If you hate it, we’ll kill it. If you have great suggestions, we’ll add them. Just let us know.

Heavily customizable diffs

You can now change tab size, toggle whether to show whitespace, ignore whitespace changes completely, and finally, in answer to one of our most-requested features, display diffs side-by-side.

You can tell Kiln to ignore files

If you have files that you don’t need to see in Kiln, then you don’t have to: just make a file called .kilnignore in the root of your repository, specify which files you want Kiln to ignore using exactly the same syntax you use for your .hgignore files, check it in, push, and you’re done.

Kiln now supports Mercurial bookmarks

Bookmarks are fully supported in Kiln. You can navigate to a bookmark by selecting it from the “Tags” dropdown; if the bookmark is at a head, you’ll also find it in the “Heads” dropdown. We’ll be expanding the capabilities of bookmarks in coming releases, so stay tuned.

File histories now show a DAG

The history of a file is now shown as a DAG, rather than a linear history, making it much clearer what the actual history of your file was.

Massive bfiles improvements

While there are no user-visible changes for this release, we’ve made improvements across the board in our ability to handle bfiles, which should result in faster uploads and downloads and larger maximum file sizes. If you’ve had trouble getting bfiles into or out of Kiln, you should notice huge improvements in this area.

Additional search tricks

You can now search for a range of revisions by using the :: operator (e.g.,Kiln_Release_2.3.0::Kiln_Release_2.4.0) and you’ll be taken to an electric DAG showing you which changesets were added between those two revisions. You can also now search for a specific file and line number simply by searching for file:line (e.g., requirements.txt:2).

Stuff that was already there, but you might have missed

Plus, in case you missed it, we’ve added these features to Kiln since the new year:

Changesets related to a case are shown inline in FogBugz

Kiln allows jumping to the electric DAG directly from a given changeset